No longer an off-season?

Brent Harold

Wednesday

Jan 31, 2007 at 2:00 AMApr 5, 2007 at 6:34 PM

Here we are, on this very cold day in the dead of winter halfway through the off-season. That season/off-season dichotomy has always been a crucial part of local vocabulary and key to understanding life on the Outer Cape. Signs draped over Route 6 bridges on Labor Day used to say: “Last one over the bridge, please turn out the light.” And indeed it was as if summer life got switched off just that abruptly.

People who have been around for 20 years or more will tell off-season stories. My neighbor, one of the first to buy a place in this neighborhood in the Wellfleet woods, says that back in the ‘70s our sand road was so little traveled that, when his sister visited, it used to make a nice clear space in which to pitch her tent.

How dead was it after Labor Day in the old days? It was so dead, the story went, your dog (in those pre-leash law days) could sleep undisturbed all night long in the middle of Route 6. Hyperbole in service of the truth, no doubt.

To a lot of the visitors who make the town pulsate with life in summer, it probably seems pitiful, all those months of “off.” These fair-weather friends probably see local life in the off-season as humans think of horseshoe crabs in winter, eking out an unimaginably dismal life dug into the cold mud of the tidal flats.

But most locals are rather partial to eking. And it’s not as if nothing goes on here in the off-season. Selectmens’ meetings and a town meeting or two have always been a source of high entertainment. The library, the post office, banks, Mid-Cape lumberyard and town hall – and the senior center, old wine in a new vessel – all keep going, a ready source of cheer provided by the women behind counters who de facto run this town.

We can usually count on the restaurant people to keep at least one restaurant going as a suicide-prevention measure.

Wellfleet Cinemas, that bit of anomalous suburbia (a multiplex for us?), around since the mid-80s, stays open all winter. On many nights, it’s like having your choice of four private screening rooms.

But the season/off season dichotomy has begun to seem misleading.

For several years, Columbus Day, which for a long time has been good for a bit of early fall revival, is now known as the weekend before Oyster Festival. This event, now solidly established on the calendar, with its 15,000 to 20,000 attendees, far eclipses anything from the summer season, including the Fourth of July parade.

And now when January rolls around, the so-called “shoulder season” behind us, just when you might expect that off-season hibernation to start in earnest, we have the new tradition of the Merci d’Avance Dance (thanks-in-advance-dance). Better known as the Haiti fundraising party, and, like the Oyster Festival, both widely advertised and hard-core local, this is a hot spot on the midwinter calendar, both because it celebrates a connection between the Outer Cape and a village in the Caribbean and because of the heat locals can create when rising to a great occasion, especially a cold-weather occasion.

For the past several years there has been another new tradition, an off-season variation on our celebrated Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, whose stage in the little building by the harbor goes cold in mid autumn – literally, for lack of heat. For six weekends in January and February, WHAT is reborn as “WHAT at Willy’s” (Willy’s Gym in North Eastham), where $39 buys you a good dinner, remarkable staged readings and the possibility, in lively discussions with actors and directors, of influencing the choice of summer offerings.

WHAT’s new theater, now under construction on Route 6, will provide more continuity through the winter. If plans work out, Preservation Hall, the new wine in the old vessel of the abandoned Catholic church on Main Street, will make hibernation both more difficult and less necessary.

There are probably some who lament all this off-season activity.

Being switched off had its pleasures; hibernation, its restorative value. But it seems time to declare the season /off-season dichotomy an anachronism.

Brent Harold of Wellfleet, a former English professor, is a writer, designer and carpenter.His column runs every other Wednesday. Reach him at kinnacum@capecod.net.

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